#410 – Robe
Posted on June 29, 2012 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comic
I didn’t hear the term “bathrobe” until I was an adult. I always thought it was called a “towel coat”. I’m guessing it’s because I just made that up because I couldn’t think of a bathrobe anecdote to talk about here.
Tags: bath, bathrobe, shower
There seems to be a weird undercurrent of people never being told the proper names for things as children, and then confusing everyone by not knowing them as adults. My ex lost a baby-shower game because her father had always referred to an “aspirator” as a “snoogie-sucker,” and my team lost a game of Taboo! a few months ago due to the initial lead the other side got after a teammate failed to realize that no one else on earth except her family called a washcloth a “flannel.”
Flannel! Our family calls them that too. Eventually, by the time I was about 17, I found out that they’re not commonly called that. I still can’t stop myself though.
Interesting. Everybody I know in the UK calls them “flannels”, and I’d never heard the word “washcloth” before today. Perhaps “washcloth” is used more in America and “flannel” used more in the UK?
In the U.S., “flannel” generally refers to a soft, thick, large-thread, rough-woven cotton cloth usually used for winter sheets and pajamas. I don’t like flannel because it builds up static electricity if I move around a lot. (And I do! *ZAP!*)
While nearly everyone is guilty of this at least once, I find it intriguing when you run across someone who never knew the proper/general term for something, just whatever they called it. “How? You have a job where you talk to people all day, and you just now learned this?”
“… You must be one of today’s lucky 10’000.”
🙂
Ironically I do not have a job where I talk to people all day nor do I even talk to people most days and the only time I ever don’t know the proper term for something is if I’ve never seen it before in my life.
And there is us calling them “Dressing Gowns”.
A lot of common names for things are regional, and it can be fun to guess where someone’s from by what they call stuff. When we moved from 4 years in Springfield Missouri to South Boston (Dad was 31 years a Marine), what I’d been calling a ‘soda’ or ‘pop’ was suddenly a ‘tonic’, (along with the other problems of a hillbilly accent!)
try being chinese born in america. all the stuff caucasians parents pass onto their kids i didn’t get from my chinese parents. so naturally, speaking fluent english, others would kind of expect me to know words that would have been learned throughout the course of a traditional american upbringing.
example, i didn’t know the term was cul-de-sac until a few years ago; kept referring to it as a “court”